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BIG PHYSICS, BIG QUESTIONS –

Forum: Goodbye to stinks and all that – A victim to technology

By SUSAN ALDRIDGE

THE 1990s are almost upon us andit’s goodbye to the romance ofchemistry.
They’ve raised the cashfor my replacement and it’s going to sit thereon
the bench, humming away like a fancymicrowave oven as it churns out designermolecules.
Before I send my lab coat tothe Science Museum and settle down to programming
this automatic synthesiser, I can’t resist the temptation to reminisce a
little about the old days.

You were going to synthesise a new compound. Usually there’d be a few
clues on how to set about it in a Germanic tome from the 1890s – something
like Liebig’s Annalen or Hoppe-Seyler’s Zeitschrift. So that was Monday
morning spoken for – ferreting around in the musty stacks of the library,
laughing at the quaint yet self-congratulatory tone of our turn-of-the-century
predecessors (‘We naturally obtained the most wonderful, beautiful and glittering
white crystals’).

Monday afternoon was for lifting apparatus from colleagues in the lab,
using a quick squirt of acetone to remove warnings from pieces of glassware
– warnings such as ‘Do not touch! Danger of sudden death!’ and ‘Hands off!
I need this test tube!’ Then the glass-blower had to be bribed – with a
pint at the Lead and Alchemist – to knock up a four-necked flask for you
in half an hour. On Tuesday, you put it all together with vacuum grease
and clamp stands, then packed sodium wire into some of today’s forbidden
solvents (technical grade) to clean them up. The rest of the day would be
spent helping to put out the flames from someone else’s explosion, and relaxing
with a quiet smoke round the mercury reservoir on the lab’s leaking vacuum
line.

Wednesday was refluxing day and a good time for a decent flood. Only
really fun, this one, if you were working on the fifth floor and got called
out by Security in the middle of the night to mop up. Then Thursday was
work-up day – in more ways than one – and time to isolate your compound
from the mixture you had cooked it in. A black tarry residue was the signal
for an ether party, or, better still, bunging the whole mess in the fridge
for a few months and nipping off to the Lead and Alchemist. There you would
have the customary session of swapping tales of your lack of results with
those of your lab-mates (one of whom had lost her lucky ‘danger of sudden
death’ test tube and couldn’t do any work at all).

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The black tar you did not really need to worry about; for, as organic
chemists know, black tars will always turn into the most wonderful, beautiful,
glittering white crystals if you leave them alone for long enough. Apparently,
this used to have something to do with Hoppe-Seyler’s crowd visiting other
people’s labs and leaning over the black tar and muttering incantations
while stroking their beards. Nowadays it’s called morphic resonance and
its works without the beards.

Friday was washing-up day. There will be no lab washing-up in the decade
of automatic synthesis, as all apparatus will be plastic and disposable.
Either that or Health and Safety (which was invented about 10 years ago)
will require decontamination processes that can be carried out only by specialist
firms at a price. It’s funny, but people are always wearing gloves in the
lab these days, as if they were about to commit a crime. In the old days,
you only ever got out the rubber gloves for plunging your armsup to the
elbow into a dark vat of chromicacid. (Rather like a lucky dip, the chromicacid
bath. You never knew what mightbe lurking in the silt at the bottom – that
special five-necked flask maybe, or awhole family of magnetic stirrers.)

Washing-up done, bench wiped down, the only job left was to put out
the flames. Yes – on a Friday evening, people were in a hurry to get away
and there’d be the odd bit of sodium that somehow got thrown into the sink
or waste-paper bin. Or they’d leave the top off the ether. It used to be
nice to leave for the weekend knowing that you had, single-handedly, saved
the building from being razed to the ground. What’s going to replace that
sort of job satisfaction with the synthesiser?

All right, let’s look on the bright side. Here’s a fast-forward to a
week with the synthesiser. On Monday morning you wake up and, having (obviously)
interfaced the beast with your bedside PC, you type in your peptide or DNA
sequence. It’s no good you 1980s has-beens bleating, ‘But what happened
to isoindole?’ or ‘Can’t you make any para-nitro compounds?’ – only biological
polymers have any credibility these days. Then you turn over for a well-earned
snooze. Then it’s down to the (refurbished) Lead and Alchemist mid-afternoon
to swop recipes for protecting groups (a form of contraception for chemicals
to stop indiscriminate bonding between functional groups). Finally, you
return home to receive smug, self-congratulatory messages from the synthesiser
on your answerphone.

The same routine applies to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday; only the
theme of the mid-afternoon discussion varies. Tuesday is Protein Sequence
Scrabble, Wednesday is a seminar entitled ‘New Frontiers in Modern Poetry
with theGenetic Code’ (TA TA, CAT. . .) andon Thursday it’s the History
of Sciencediscussion group considering ‘100 wayswith a six-necked flask’.

On Friday, though, you actually have to go into the lab, give the synthesiser
a chemical carrot, top up its reservoirs, remove its waste bottles and collect
the wonderful, beautiful and glittering white crystals. What white crystals?
Oh no! You discover that someone has fed them into the automatic analyser.

Ah well, she always did say she’d get me back for borrowing those test
tubes – they weren’t labelled ‘danger of sudden death’ for nothing.